alt Hacker NewsNone of the Pages icons are recognisable because almost no one uses Pages. The word icon is just a blue W which is not any more illustrative than an orange pen.
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One of my favorite series is Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper... in In Ashes Born, there's an bit about creating a logo for the company...
He pointed to the far end of his studio. Two tiny patches of white—which were probably actually gray—lay in a single pool of light. One was a smudge of red and the other was a spiral of red. “Which one of those is your logo?” he asked.
“Neither,” Pip said.
“The smudge,” I said understanding where the kid was taking us.
“Right,” he said. “The smudge.”
“What?” Pip asked.
The kid held up the paper from the workbench. “Look, this is nice and all, but it’s too fussy. If you look at anybody else’s logo, it’s not fussy. It’s iconic. A crown with wings. A C in a circle. That’s yours,” he said to Pip. “All of them are simple shapes combined to form an unmistakable pattern.”
The goal of an icon is to be able to identify it quickly without having to read the associated text.
The inkwell and the two with the paper are artistic - but they aren't things that stand out quickly when you're trying to find them in the launchpad or on the sidebar.
Pages is orange. Numbers is green. iTunes is red. Keynote is blue.
For Microsoft, Word is blue, Excel is green, and Powerpoint is orange (and Outlook has an envelope like shape). The letter reinforces the choice, but that's more of a hint and reinforcement.
The shape and color is the important thing for quickly finding what you're looking for.
Document, pen, orange, and name "Pages" is pretty excellent all round for recognisability in my opinion.
Over the years Word/Powerpoint/Excel have done similar things, they have their own colour, their own name/letter, and usually have had a descriptive graphic in the icon too, indicating a document, grid, or slide.
The office icons are rather subtle but do sorta illustrate what they do if you look carefully - the word icon is a list, the excel icon is a spreadsheet, and the powerpoint icon is a pie chart.
That you have to look closely is kinda crap lol. Whoever designed the icons was more obsessed with consistent branding instead of making icons that make sense.
Looking at the start menu, some MS icons are great. Paint, Notepad, Calculator are all fantastic.